Credits

Background

Arbor was originally commissioned by the New York Times Magazine for use in their 2008 Hollywood issue. (Although upper- and lowercase were delivered, only the uppercase was used.) The entire project took three weeks, and the results were gratifying.

This was one of those projects I like to call “channeling”, where I am provided with a few letters and then it is my job to make a typeface based on or inspired by those letters. In this case, the source was Rob Roy Kelly’s book of woodtype samples, and the glyphs were the D and H from Caslon’s “Italian” of the 1820s. Instead of further investigating the Caslon face, I set about making my own type, making the serifs and their horizontal brethren the heavy parts of the letters. The results could not be more dissimilar to a genuine Italian, which literally reversed all weight conventions from “regular” typefaces, resulting in what can be fairly described as crazy.

Arbor is my channeling of an idea from the Italian style, resulting in a new, and entirely un-Italian, typeface.